I choose you, Film Theory! Use mind-blow! We'll see how effective it is. Don't change that YouTube dial, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, you are on the right channel. Today, we're covering the upcoming Pokémon movie, "Detective Pikachu". A film that made the ballsy choice of having video games' cutest mascot voiced by Deadpool. "Nobody's getting hurt!" *crash* And man, has it worked! These trailers are setting the internet on fire with this bizarre cognitive dissonance that they're creating. Cognitive dissonance, just so you know, is when you have conflicting thoughts and attitudes existing at the same time. Like when you smoke, but you know that it's bad for you. Or here, where you think "Oh, what a cute little Pokémon!", and then hear his creepy man voice
popping out of your favorite Pika! "Get me the hell outta here!" They've been the first trailers in a long time to actually make me feel optimistic about the prospect of a live-action video game movie, even if all the Pokémon are eerily fuzzy, or look like they've just lost a ton of weight. I mean, apparently Charizard has been getting himself on the Weight Watchers! Look at those rolls! Now, "Detective Pikachu" features an entirely new main character, Tim Goodman, who explores Ryme city, a completely new location that we've never seen before in any other Pokémon media, aside from the game of the same name, which to be clear, I will be ignoring for today's theory. Maybe I'll cover it later on Game Theory, or after the movie releases, and compare and contrast the two, who knows! Tim's father goes missing, and shortly thereafter, he stumbles across a Pikachu that can talk and considers itself to be a detective. "I don't need a Pokémon! Period!" "Then what about a world class detective?!" Beyond that though, this talking Pikachu is a complete mystery, considering he just woke up with amnesia. "Woke up with a heavy case of amnesia in the middle of nowhere." Memory loss, you say? You know what that means! This 'mon has clearly got himself some history, which means a theory. So, while the obvious answer is probably that Pikachu is somehow connected to Tim's missing father, or, heck, IS Tim's missing father! I had a more exciting idea pitched to me on Reddit by /u/Simple_Meme_Lord that I'd like to explore. That this Pikachu is Ash's Pikachu? Yes, Ash from the anime. As different as this movie seems, is there a chance that this could be a part of the same canon timeline as the TV show? Could the secret of Detective Pikachu's forgotten history actually be that he served as Ash's faithful companion, for over a thousand episodes of animated splendor? It sounds like an outlandish idea, and heck, it probably is, but the more you dig into the countless details that are hidden in these trailers, the more and more all of this starts to make sense. Let's do this, Detective Pikachu style! I choose you, corkboard of evidence! Clue number one: Ryme City. Now, as I already mentioned, "Detective Pikachu" is set in a city that we've never seen before in the previous mainline Pokémon games or the TV show. However, it would be a huge mistake to assume that this means it takes place in a completely separate world. You see, we get several clear indications in the trailer that, though Ryme City is in a new location, it's set in the same Pokémon universe that we're already familiar with. In Tim's bedroom, we see that he has a poster for "Sinnoh Championship XXIV", an obvious reference to the region that's introduced in the "Diamond & Pearl" games and TV seasons. A more detailed look at his bedroom wall shows posters for the Johto sports club, another reference to a region that we're already familiar with from the Johto League seasons of the anime. While Ash's journeys have never taken us to Ryme City before, it's pretty safe to conclude that we're still in the same established Pokemon world. Still, it would be a huge leap to assume that just because we're seeing the names of familiar locations that we're also in the TV show. After all, the video games have the exact same locations and regions as the anime. But the games and anime follow a completely different canon. The video games don't have a character named Ash Ketchum, who travels around Kanto, with Brock and Misty for instance. and even within the games themselves, there's already a confirmed multiverse. One with mega evolutions, and one without. For more information on that, I go way in depth in this episode of Game Theory. However, the trailer gives us another big hint about a link between the "Detective Pikachu" movie and the TV show, leading us to clue number two: Jigglypuff. For one brief moment in the trailer, we see a Jigglypuff, but not just any Jigglypuff. Look at what it has in its hand - a microphone with the green cover. Now, this could just be an easter egg, but any fan of the anime will immediately recognize what's going on in that scene. First introduced in Episode 45 of the anime, the song of Jigglypuff, this one particular Pokémon has been a recurring character on the TV show for over 20 years, showing up to sing a lullaby, getting angry when the lullaby puts everyone to sleep, and then trolling everyone by pulling the cap off its microphone, to reveal that it was actually a marker the whole time! Which it then uses to draw on everyone's faces like the only sober guy at a frat party. Carrying around that iconic microphone isn't something that's inherently part of a Jigglypuff's DNA, it is something that is specifically tied to one unique character in the anime, a character who now seems to be appearing in the trailer for Detective Pikachu. and if one Pokémon from the anime managed to find its way into Ryme City, surely Ash's Pikachu could have done the same. Clue the third and fourth: Fragments of memory. Now, let's focus a bit more on our main character - Detective Pikachu himself. We don't get too much information about him, on account of that amnesia, but we do learn one key fact: "So you're a talking Pikachu with no memories who's addicted to caffeine." He's addicted to caffeine, specifically coffee. This, according to the original creators of the game, was a riff on the trope of Detectives using pipes, a way to make Pikachu feel older and more hard-bitten, but still keep him family friendly. And while coffee itself doesn't appear in the anime, from what I can find we do have plenty of scenes over the years of Ash's Pikachu eagerly drinking tea. clearly he's a character who likes human beverages, especially beverages that are caffeinated. So making the jump from tea to coffee in an older, more adult film would make perfect sense. The only other thing that we know about him is that, despite having amnesia, Pikachu remembers having dealt with Charizards in the past. "Now, obviously I've dealt with this putz before" Note that he says "dealt with", and not "battled". You see, Ash's Pikachu never truly battles Charizard in the anime. But, both Ash and Pikachu had to deal with all sorts of misbehaving difficult Charizards in the past. So, this would actually line up very well with our theory that they're one and the same. It's a similar story here with Mr. Mime as well. In the trailer, Pikachu seems to have a solid understanding of how to deal with the awkward mime Pokémon. "He's barely moving!" "Don't tell him that!" Something that Ash's Pikachu would also be familiar with, considering his master's mother had a Mime constantly working in their household. And finally, clue the fifth: let's talk talking. It's easy to overlook, but obviously, the most striking thing about this character is that he can talk, except, it's not 100% true. the trailer makes it very clear that while Tim can understand what Pikachu is saying, no other human can. "You can hear him, right?" "Pika-pika!" "Yeah, pika-pika-pika, he's adorable! "You're adorable!" "They can't understand me." Afraid not there, Tim. Pikachu isn't actually speaking English, he's capable of speaking in a way that's only understood by Tim. And that sounds an awful lot like how we see Pikachu communicating with Ash throughout the anime, even if he's not voiced by Ryan Reynolds. "Pikachu!" "You wanna go too, buddy? "Pika!" "Right!" And we don't just have to infer it off of the way that Ash talks about Pikachu, We've actually seen them speak directly to each other before, in the 20th Pokémon movie, (yeah, they made twenty of these things) "Pokémon: I Choose You!". We actually learn an important fact about how humans and Pokémon, and more specifically, how Ash and Pikachu are capable of understanding each other. In the movie's big climax, we actually hear a Pokémon talk: "It's because I always want to be with you." Now, to a lot of people, this seemed totally out of place, and not just because Pikachu sounds like a rejected character from Rugrats. No, it was because Pikachu just doesn't talk. It's not like Team Rocket's Meowth, "No matter what trash you throw at me, love wins in the end!" But here, it doesn't seem like Pikachu is talking in the same way that Meowth does. As in, if you held up a microphone to Pikachu during this moment, it would probably sound like a very sad "Pikapika!". It's exactly the same narrative device that Detective Pikachu is using, we're seeing things not as they literally are, but from the perspective of Ash, who has the ability to understand what Pikachu is saying to him in this moment of desperation, in the same way that Tim is somehow able to understand what Detective Pikachu is specifically saying to him. Now granted, this particular movie follows a different continuity, but the evidence of Ash and Pikachu understanding each other on a deeper level than the outside world is definitely there. So if Pikachu were ever to be separated from Ash, the human that he's closer to than anyone else in the world, he would probably be in a pretty bad place. Spending years travelling with a human who understood you well enough that you could have conversations with them, only to then be thrust into a world full of humans that look at you and only hear the words "Pika pika!", would get pretty darn lonely, just like we see happen to Detective Pikachu in the trailer. "Oh my god, you can understand me?!" "Stop!" "I have been so lonely!". So let's review our corkboard of evidence one last time, We know that Detective Pikachu's location of Ryme City exists in the same world, with known locations in the Pokémon universe, like Johto and Sinnoh. More specifically, from the presence of this Jigglypuff, there's a much greater likelihood that this movie takes place in the same universe as the one where Jigglypuff constantly is trolling Ash and his friends. We know that Detective Pikachu, just like Ash's Pikachu, loves caffeine, and has experience dealing with both Mr. Mimes and Charizards. But most importantly of all, we know that both of these Pokémon are capable of being understood by specific humans in specific contexts. So saying that Detective Pikachu is Ash's Pikachu might at first seem like a huge conclusion to draw from just a few minutes of trailer footage, But this trailer is packed with so many clues and hints, that all can be pointing towards a connection between "Detective Pikachu" and the original TV show. Sure it all may seem like circumstantial evidence, but none of these details were placed in here by accident, in fact, one of the most impressive things about this trailer is how much detail they do manage to pack in. So is Detective Pikachu an older, more grizzled version of Ash's Pikachu? Did we crack the case here? Well, we'll just have to wait and see. But for now, the corkboard makes it a pretty compelling possibility. But hey, that's just a theory - a Film Theory! Aaaand cut!
